Chapter 67

Fabrisse dove.

He hurled himself sideways into the thick of the whispergrass, hit the earth with a jolt of impact, and rolled beneath the moss curtain in one scrambling breath.

[Skill Activated: Liminal Presence Drift (Rank III)]
[Auditory Dissipation Field — Passive Stealth Engaged]

The air around him dulled. His breathing seemed to vanish from his own ears. 

Somewhere above the grass line, the rattling sound of the Voidtouched Skitterwhit hissing resounded.

Fabrisse pressed his body flat, heart hammering so hard he was sure it would betray him. But his stealth spells held.

He couldn’t see the creature—but he could feel the drop in temperature as it passed overhead. The aether pressure rippled against the hairs on his arms. Its void aura was so thick it warped the air.

It didn’t see him.

Not yet.

[Aetheric Veil: Echofold (Rank II) — Ready to Cast]

He kept the spell balanced on a pin of intent, not casting it unless he had to. It would make his presence ‘echo’ behind him if he needed to sprint.

He needed to think. He needed a plan.

But if it found her again . . .

He clenched the stupid stone in his palm. Come on, think. You're Stratal Studies. You're the geology guy. There’s got to be something around here you can use.

He saw a big rock. He wanted to reach for it, but stopped himself in time.

No time to be a brave idiot. If it’s going after me, I need to bait it into looking for me. I’ll buy time until help arrives.

The Skitterwhit let out a low, grinding screech. Then it dropped straight down towards him.

Fabrisse’s instincts surged.

[Aetheric Veil: Echofold — Cast]

His presence unhooked from where he was and echoed a few steps behind. The creature slammed down into nothing, biting into air where he would have been.

Chopped grass flew all over the sky.

Fabrisse bolted.

He sprinted low, ducking between ridges of wildroot and scattered boulders, using every curve of terrain to vanish again. If he could make it to the ditch near the thistle trees, he might have line-of-sight cover long enough to—

A burst of blue-white aether cracked the sky.

He skidded to a stop and turned.

Liene was upright again, one hand raised like a conductor—and from her palm, a bolt of chained lightning cracked across the field. It slammed into the Skitterwhit’s side, illuminating its void-flesh in stark relief.

[Spell Detected: Arclend Discharge (Rank II)]

The creature shrieked and flared outward, rippling in strange, distorted geometry.

Target: Voidtouched Skitterwhit

[Status: Aetherically Shocked, Momentarily Stunned, Unreasonably Angered]

She can do that? Lightning-based was not far from Light-based mechanic-wise, but in practice, it was a much different offensive branch of Thaumaturgy.

Fabrisse didn’t have time to marvel.

Liene dropped.

She hit one knee, chest heaving, her arm trembling as blue-white sparks fizzled off her palm. Her glow vanished like a snuffed torch.

She must’ve had next to no FP left.

She was out in the open.

The Skitterwhit’s wings curled, shadows folding inward like it was preparing to dive not just at her, but through her.

Fabrisse was too far. Too slow. Too empty-handed.

Liene was still kneeling, trying to raise a shield. Her hands wouldn’t obey.

The creature surged—

And fire fell from the sky.

A torrent of gold-orange blaze erupted from above, searing down in a massive funnel of focused combustion. The entire space between the Skitterwhit and Liene ignited with a sound like a hundred scrolls being incinerated all at once.

The creature screamed—actually screamed this time—as flames coiled around its void-flesh, pushing it back mid-air in a spiral of burning distortion. Aether bent. Shadows ripped away from its form like cloth being torn from a nail.

Target: Voidtouched Skitterwhit

[Status: Externally Burned, Unreasonably Angered]

[Status: Internally Scorched, Momentarily Stunned, Afraid]

[Status: Critical Burn Damage Taken, Petrified]

The flames kept coming.

Line after line of golden fire swept the field in arcing streaks, chasing the shadow-stitched thing like a predator herding prey. Fabrisse shielded his face with one arm as the heat pressed close, crackling against the grass. The Skitterwhit screeched and twisted, its wings unraveling as its form flickered from something solid to a vibrating smear of colorless void.

Then it stopped moving.

The void convulsed, then split.

The creature tore open from the inside out, split by fire, and disintegrated midair. Black ash and warped aether fell like scorched confetti.

Target: Voidtouched Skitterwhit

[Status: Deceased]

[Combat Completed]

[Progress to Level 5: 1290/1500]

Partial XP distributed. Attribution pending review.

The wind dropped.

Fabrisse didn’t move.

The flames had stopped, but the heat still clung to his skin like memory. His fingers, still curled around the now-useless stupenstone, were trembling, and he hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been gripping it until his knuckles began to ache.

Ash drifted through the air, settling on the whispergrass in slow, weightless spirals.

The sky overhead was still scorched gold where the flare had climbed. Bits of aether-scorched cloud lingered like bruises across the horizon. The kind of sky that didn’t look like it belonged to students anymore.

He exhaled. It came out shaky.

They should’ve been dead.

Then Tommaso landed.

He wasn’t smirking.

He stepped off the scorched hover-disc with a controlled motion and crossed the field in three wide strides—eyes locked not on the ashes, but on Liene, who was still on one knee, blinking blearily with her arm clutched against her ribs.

“Linny,” he said tightly, crouching beside her. “Where are you hit?” Then he looked at Fabrisse. “You okay, dude?”

She opened her mouth to joke, probably, but nothing came out. She just shook her head and pointed at her own chest, meaning: no major punctures, no bleedout.

Tommaso exhaled slowly, then nodded. “Okay. I’ve got you. Just breathe.”

Fabrisse finally reached them. “She used Arclend Discharge. She lit up that thing like a streetlamp on a festival night, and then—”

“I know,” Tommaso said. “I saw the flare.”

The field was eerily quiet for a beat, until the silence broke.

A snap. Then a pop. Then another. A chain of bright explosions blazed across the far edge of the field as dozens of ordinary Skitterwhits, startled by the firestorm, began flaring in panic.

Their aether fuzz overcharged.

One by one, they burst midair like overripe aether bubbles. Each burst released erratic pulses of ambient aether.

Then the ground answered.

The artifact lines—faintly buried, ancient, and semi-dormant—began to shimmer under the topsoil. Faint runes blinked into visibility like something waking from a long, spiteful sleep.

Fabrisse’s stomach dropped.

“Tom,” he breathed. “The lines. The resonance—”

“I see it.”

Runoff aether + shallow wards + burst mana discharge. It was the exact combination the professors always cited in horror stories during field safety lectures. Uncontained resonance discharge could fry the whole region’s ley harmonics, maybe even collapse part of the campus barrier lattice. Ley was the most annoying form of aether from an ecological standpoint, since it was (apart from inside Rolen’s chamber) the naturally occuring channels of concentrated aether, which meant it was much more sensitive to manipulation from the environment.

Then a voice rang out like a blade drawn through frost, “Still the air, seal the breath, frost to bone. Halt.”

A gleam of silver and blue swept over the scorched field in a wave.

Dozens of radiant sigils spun overhead. The heat in the air vanished, and the pulsing ground lines stopped glowing.

Fabrisse looked up just as Ilya Snezhnaya descended.

Her robes—swan-white, hemmed with mirror thread—barely rippled as she hovered on a gleaming runic circle, one hand raised, the other cradling a relic staff crowned with a crystal node.

She landed with a sound like snowfall. Her eyes scanned the chaos.

“Situation,” she demanded.

Tommaso stood. “I’ve got no clue what got into that giant skitterwhit thing, but I’ve detonated it.”

“Ardefiamme. Be serious.”

“Okay, okay. Liene dropped a flare. I lit the rest.”

Ilya’s gaze didn’t leave the sky above the field, where residual aether trails still curled like lightning scars. “That combustion pattern was from a maximum output Rank V spell. The local ley was stirring. That’s reckless.”

Tommaso threw up his hands, “Well, I didn’t know how strong that little thing was!”

“You didn’t have to rupture the leybed in the process.”

“Guys,” Fabrisse said sharply, louder than either of them. “Liene is still hurt.”

That silenced them both.

Tommaso’s gaze directed toward the field where Liene was still half-slouched in the grass, one arm wrapped weakly around her ribs. She was watching the argument with half-lidded eyes, her expression equal parts pained and amused.

Ilya exhaled as she picked up her staff. “The leyfield still needs containment. If this runoff spreads, it could trigger deeper artifact lines. You—” she pointed to Tommaso, “—stay here. Reinforce the outer arc. And do not, under any circumstances, cast above Rank III.”

Tommaso gave a short nod, chastened for once.

“I’ll handle the core.” She turned, robes whispering across the scorched ground as she left.

“Who was that?” Liene asked as Fabrisse knelt beside her.

“That’s Ilya.”

“She looks amazing. Is she Tom’s girlfriend?”

“Yes.” He scanned her. She’d gotten a few cuts along the legs, and her arms are bruised to nether. “How are you feeling?”

He peeled back the edge of her sleeve, gingerly, so as not to worsen the already angry swelling, and winced. The bruise along her forearm was a vivid plum-purple with faint aether burn at the edges. “I’ve got basic wrap balm,” he said, reaching into the side pocket of his satchel. Dubbie had shoved the balm into one of his pockets, and he for once appreciated his sister’s thoroughness. He fumbled for a cloth square, then a small tin etched with a faintly glowing green leaf sigil. “It’s not for combat wounds, but it’ll stabilize until Ilya’s done wrangling the sky.”

Liene leaned her head back and sighed dramatically. “I love it when a boy dabs moss paste on my flesh wounds.” Then she craned her neck over to Tommaso, who was kneeling in a scorched patch of grass, angrily sketching containment runes into the dirt with the end of a half-charred wand. “Is your girlfriend always that serious?”

“She was a lot more chill the last time I saw her,” Fabrisse whispered.

“I can joke around when ley energy is threatening to rupture the local vicinity. She can’t,” Tommaso replied before resuming muttering under his breath every time the glow from one sigil failed to stabilize.

A glowing snowflake-shaped sigil floated gently down from above and pinned itself neatly into place beside him.

Liene gave a weak laugh. “Wow. At least there’s one adult here to babysit the three of us.”

Then Fabrisse received a nudge from the System.

[EXP Rewarded for Partial Participation: 75]

[Progress to Level 5: 1365/1500]

A whole 75? But I got like one hit in.

That got him wondering how much EXP Tommaso got, if EXP meant anything for anyone else at all.